alt Hacker NewsLots of people have built commercial, non-military, boutique scale stuff in hardened facilities, nobody I'm aware of has done it at scale. There's certainly money to be made from selling expensive "we put datacenter stuff deep down inside a mine" maybe to some weird enterprise and government customers, so the revenue per rack (or per theoretical 208V 30A circuit?) is probably a lot more than commodity colo. But I would very much like to see the aerial photos, if anyone can link them, to a claimed large scale underground or hardened datacenter.
It's a severe engineering challenge to hide massive heat exchangers on the scale of the datacenters built in the industrial area near Dulles (coordinate example: 38.9817915,-77.417775). Find those on a map and observe the scale of their cooling and generator systems and then try to find anything comparable that's been built underground.
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Agreed it’s small potatoes, and as a sibling mentions you will still have infrastructure exposed that poses a target to disable the data center, unless you were to drill geothermal and find an underground river to cool it.
Just wanted to make the point you don’t have to pay to excavate the cave :)
Germans hid plane engine factories underground with old (not so efficient) diesel generators running 24/7. 80 years ago, so the tech was leaner. Also they didn’t have issues with ventilation and even today if you don’t know where - you won’t see anything driving around.
That's probably just because there's not much demand for it, not because it's difficult.
There are mines with plenty of space in them, and heat removal can be done with water cooling. But who is going to pay 50% more for that when it isn't needed 99.99% of the time?
There's some 200MW capacity (only 80MW is currently used or being built) data center in a mine near a fjord in Norway. The limiting factor for its capacity seems to be the capacity of the electricity net nearby (which you can just hit and the DC is useless). With how NIMBY Norwegians are there's no way it would ever get to a GW or more even if it might be both technically and economically feasible. That's just one project and can't be replicated anywhere else. It's just a massive advantage that above ground datacenters are relatively 'figured out' and similar everywhere.
edit: 61.9340107, 5.5084207 are the coordinates